Common Vista/Win7 scenario:  the app you’ve written runs with elevated permissions, but then needs to start another program as the non-elevated desktop user.  For example, you want to display web content.  Now, you could just launch the web browser from your app, and let the web browser run as admin.  What could go wrong?  (Hint:  the correct answer will include

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Common Vista/Win7 scenario:  the app you’ve written runs with elevated permissions, but then needs to start another program as the non-elevated desktop user.  For example, you want to display web content.  Now, you could just launch the web browser from your app, and let the web browser run as admin.  What could go wrong?  (Hint:  the correct answer will include

... read more

I do a lot of presentations on how to identify and fix “LUA bugs” in applications (*), both for Windows XP and Windows Vista.  I frequently use a little VB6 application to demonstrate writing to various portions of the file system and registry, write to .ini files in protected locations, restart services, explicitly check for admin rights, etc.  People have

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I do a lot of presentations on how to identify and fix “LUA bugs” in applications (*), both for Windows XP and Windows Vista.  I frequently use a little VB6 application to demonstrate writing to various portions of the file system and registry, write to .ini files in protected locations, restart services, explicitly check for admin rights, etc.  People have

... read more

I do a lot of presentations on how to identify and fix “LUA bugs” in applications (*), both for Windows XP and Windows Vista.  I frequently use a little VB6 application to demonstrate writing to various portions of the file system and registry, write to .ini files in protected locations, restart services, explicitly check for admin rights, etc.  People have

... read more

LUA Buglight is a utility that helps identify “LUA bugs” in applications — application features that that fail as standard user but that work as administrator.  I work on it in my spare time, so progress has been slow.  Attached to this blog post is the second preview version of LUA Buglight 2.0.

Main changes since the previous preview:

LUA Buglight is a utility that helps identify “LUA bugs” in applications — application features that that fail as standard user but that work as administrator.  I work on it in my spare time, so progress has been slow.  Attached to this blog post is the second preview version of LUA Buglight 2.0.

Main changes since the previous preview:

I’m on the schedule to speak at Tech*Ed EMEA in Barcelona the week of November 3-7.  I’ve got three sessions listed below (sharing CLI08-IS with Chris Jackson): 

Code

Title

Date/Time

CLI403

Tools for Identifying “LUA Bugs” (Admin-Permissions-Required Bugs)

November 6 18:00 – 19:15

Lots of programs were designed by developers running as admin for users running as admin, and lots of

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I recently switched internet service providers, not realizing when I did that PrivBar and MakeMeAdmin would suddenly disappear from the internet when they un-provisioned my space on their servers.  Oops.

To try to compensate you for the inconvenience, PrivBar is now available once again, now in x86 and x64 versions.  So if you are running an

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Attached to this blog post is a PREVIEW VERSION of LUA Buglight 2.0.  LUA Buglight is a utility that helps identify “LUA bugs” in desktop applications — the bugs that appear when the application is run as a standard user instead of as an administrator.

Some of the improvements in LUA Buglight 2.0 over its predecessor: